Taking digital photography for granted

Between Nadine and myself, we've got about 3600 digital photos, starting back from around 1998, all loosely organized into a "Pictures" directory on the network share. I've been putting off the task of organizing them properly, mainly due to the huge time investment I'd need to make in order to do so. Found digikam in an Ubuntu packages search - oh man. Such a nice interface. Got everything properly dated in a weekend, going back through and leisurely tagging now. Stores everything in sqlite, has dated views, categorizations via tag, plugins galore... just damn nice. Finally feel like having the kde libs around is worthwhile. I want to checkout picasa at some point as well, now that they have a linux binary -- but for the moment, digikam is awfully nice.

Saw a blurb about hugin a couple of months back, and have been meaning to try it out on something. Snapped 4 images around a local park (I like how the lightpost looks like it's growing the middle of a forest) - and ran them through hugin. Nadine's little Canon is far too automatic to take 4 images with the same exposures... and the subject matter is pretty boring overall - but I'm pretty amazed with the stitching.

I think a nicely stitched panorama using hdr would make for some mind blowing images.